Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Friday July 26, 2013 @12:03PM
from the trust-no-one dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Following the /. story on the Feds demanding SSL keys, now comes news that the feds are demanding user passwords, and in some cases, the encryption algorithm and salt used. From the article: 'A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the person said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'" ... Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. ... Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts.' I'm next expecting to see the regulation or law demanding that all users use plain text for all web transactions, to catch terrorists and for the children."

As sad as it is, I have to agree. This doesn't surprise me one bit. I mean, investigating is hard! Can't have criminals hide behind things like strong encryption! Ergo, no one can use encryption.

That said, I'm hoping we're slowly getting to a tipping point on the entire privacy vs security discussion. 9/11 has happened long ago enough that the knee-jerk reactions are dying down, and people are starting to question what we're doing in order to make sure 3000 people don't die over the course of a few years.

1. A company shouldn't have my password stored anywhere in a form that they can decrypt it.
2. A company shouldn't have the answers to my security questions stored anywhere in a form that they can decrypt it.

That makes it very easy then: "We would gladly comply with your request, but sorry, we can't".

About these penetrations. You would think there would be daily broadcasts from anonymous or somebody indicating which systems have been hacked by the government. Its like people arent talking about it much at all.

I think the point is that groups that thought the Gov were full of crap got targeted, and the media painted as lib versus con, when it is more like pro gov vs against gov. Plenty of lib groups think obama has lost the plot and all the tea party groups say he never had that plot to begin with.

Alas, the lib groups got the stoners and the Con groups got the racists, and those two groups ruined everything.

It won't matter friend as the PTB has learned they have another "mother may I" magic word that works even better than terrorist, and that is pedo. If you think the whole "peed on a bush and became a sex offender" bit is bad you should look at the CP laws and how vaguely they have been written. According to a friend that works in the state crime lab you could draw a stick figure and stick a label under it saying "nekkid 10 year old" and be looking at several years in prison and otherwise sane people will happily let the feds have ANY power they ask for just by invoking the "for the children" meme, hell we've seen otherwise rational people on this very site willing to ignore any and all violations of privacy if it was "to stop teh pedos".

Exactly... My tinfoil hat says that this would be really useful for dealing with people like Snowden. Can't find a woman that will claim he raped her? No problem, just use his credentials to post child porn somewhere. Congrats! You now have a blank check to do anything you want, and remove all public support for them in the process.

1,960 architects and engineers disagree with you [architects-engineers.org] and consider the official story to be questionable. Modern steel skyscrapers don't fall because of small fires, even if they burn for hours. The idea that an unplanned mishap would result in such a buiding's freefall--with no internal resistance--is an absurdity.

1,960 architects and engineers disagree with you [architects-engineers.org] and consider the official story to be questionable. Modern steel skyscrapers don't fall because of small fires, even if they burn for hours. The idea that an unplanned mishap would result in such a buiding's freefall--with no internal resistance--is an absurdity.